Democratizing the data

Data is a critical component of any digital experience. It allows us to understand where our customers have been, what they’re looking for, and what they’re interested in learning with pinpoint accuracy. Making decisions based on data improves the experience for the customer and the results across the organization.

At Sitecore, we’re on a mission to enable everybody in our organization to use and interpret data comfortably. No matter what their individual level of expertise, making sure that the entire team can feel confident in working with data means that each person is much more likely to use data to drive their decisions and build experiences and campaigns that are informed and powered by that data.

This mission is shared across the company; from sales operations to marketing operations, customer success, and product teams, we find ways to measure the results and make those outcomes visible to the wider organization, along with training and enablement to help them understand the data.

For the DX Team, this means that our entire marketing team, along with anyone else in the company who needs to see Sitecore.com data, has access to everything they need to assess their campaigns, keep track of their target markets, and discover opportunities for optimization.

The DX Team gives them the data to self-serve and the training to understand what they’re seeing, an ongoing process as new team members join and new systems are integrated. This has transformed the way that our teams think about data, which has, in turn, transformed the way that they use it. When data is easily accessible and understandable it becomes a valuable asset rather than a mandatory step to be gotten through as quickly as possible.

We’ve enabled our teams in a few different ways:

• We’ve built out reports in Google Data Studio so they can look at SEO results, investigate search terms for their content, and see analytics across the world or filtered to their region, campaign, or topic of interest.
• We’ve partnered with RelevantEdge to connect our XP analytics to PowerBI and built out a series of dashboards that the marketers and wider teams can use anytime they like. From our C-Suite to our field marketing teams, the whole organization is using these dashboards to understand the customers on our site, and the content and functionality those customers are seeking at any stage of their journey.
• We regularly, and on-demand, conduct enablement sessions to help individual teams learn the tools and accurately interpret what they’re seeing. The data is available to them at any time with smart filters and explanations built-in for continued enablement.

This approach has had a rolling impact on cooperation and innovation throughout our teams. Our goal of data-driven marketing has been taken to new heights with data insights being widely shared and discussed as part of campaign planning and journey mapping. Making data accessible and understandable is key to adoption and utilization.